Congress Revising US Health Care – You Have To Have a Sense of Humor…

Think “Keystone Kops” – With Pockets Stuffed With Cash…

Opinion by “Deplorable” Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen

US Silent Film mogul Mack Sennett between 1912, and 1917 (yup, a hundred years ago) featured what he called the “Keystone Kops,” a group of completely incompetent policemen which, during any activity, “the Kops clutching at their hats, leaping in the air in surprise, running energetically in any direction, and taking extreme pratfalls.”

Watch this three-minute video below – to get a feel for the Health Care deliberations in the 2017 Congress…

Sound familiar?

Of course it does….

Mack Sennett could have choreographed the entire recent Senate hearing process of “Repeal and Replace” of ObamaCare.

The liberal Democrats, this time, were the audience.  They just sat there doing nothing.  Why?  Well, two reasons actually: (1)  They were responsible for passing ObamaCare in the first place.  They had never read the legislation before they passed it, so they, as a group, had NO IDEA  what was in it, and they still don’t to this day.  I’ll show you what the Democrats didn’t notice down below in this article.

And (2)  The Democrats, nationwide, are in the pocket of Big Pharma.  They are completely dependant upon Big Pharma for election dollars – so Democrats DO WHAT THEY ARE TOLD – no exceptions.  Their OTHER campaign funding mechanisms, like public/private partnerships in “climate change” frauds are drying up by-the-minute.  The liberal Democrats are frozen in place after the shock of presidential election 2016 – as well they should be.

But this time it was the Republicans which provided street comedy.

They couldn’t deliver on a simple “Repeal and Replace” bill for ObamaCare.  Why?  That’s where it gets funny, really humorous, where somebody like Mack Sennett could have made a comedy movie out of it.

What Mack Sennett  would have done was to load up the “Kops” into their vehicle, drive them down the road, and have the right front tire blow, right in front of a tire/tube shop.  The “Kops” in the movie would proceed to take off the tire, pull out the tube, which would have an obvious thirty-two patches on it already, and add ten more patches, and put the wheel back on, which would, of course “pop” as soon as the jack was let down.  The “Kops” would do this five more times in a row, adding more and more patches to no avail.

Finally, “The Chief” would order the “Kops” to carry the front of the car to their next call location.  When the car was moved a sign on the front of the tire/tube store, that you couldn’t see before, appears that says “Tire Tube Sale Today – 2 cents”

“Tire Tube Sale Today – 2 cents?”

In short, THAT is Congress’s Health Care dilemma.  They are trying to continue to use a tire tube, so to speak, that simply does not hold air – and is a constant problem.  They need to buy a new tube.

The US Health Care system is designed, not for the patient, but for the profit of the providers.  What providers?  Big Pharma, Health Insurance companies, and the Hospital business.

American Consumers WERE NOT EVEN CONSIDERED.  Their interests were not even in the room.

The Emperor Has No Clothes…

We are NOT going to be able to solve the US Health Care issue by just changing how we pay for it.  We HAVE to change WHAT we are paying for.

Mostly, we are currently paying for expensive junk.  Period.  And why should “we the people” have to put up with that?

Well, we have to examine closely FIRST the mechanism “We the People” put in place (Congress) to straighten out our Health Care system.  The seven-minute video below will explain EVERYTHING…

Lest You think The Republicans Are Responsible For This Mess…

There was a provision in the ORIGINAL ObamaCare called the  “Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute,“ known as PCORI.  It was set up by the Affordable Care Act to test how different medical treatments stack up against one another — but PhRMA insisted that PCORI would not be able to take cost effectiveness into account — and it doesn’t.

“We the People” got screwed HERE for what this would have done would have been to compare the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals against other therapies on a case-by-case basis.  Big Pharma would have lost this battle hands down – and we would have seen the end of Big Pharma eight years ago.

Just below is what “Politico magazine” said in their 7/13/2016 article titled “The one that got away: Obamacare and the drug industry…”

“The drug industry won two other victories as the law took shape that weren’t part of its initial deal with Democrats. And both are constraining policymakers today.

One involved a new quasi-government entity — the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, known as PCORI. It was set up by the Affordable Care Act to test how different medical treatments stack up against one another — but PhRMA insisted that PCORI would not be able to take cost effectiveness into account — and it doesn’t. The Tea Party uprising against Obamacare in the summer of 2009 — and the outlandish claims that it would set up “death panels” — fed into PhRMA’s arguments. Politicians didn’t want to do anything that could fuel fears that the health bill, already controversial enough, would limit Americans’ access to treatment.

Critics say that restriction has hamstrung the independent expert group, making it hesitant to take on politically sensitive issues and unable to assess the true value of treatments. A Center for American Progress report in May found its “potential impact on the nation’s health care system has not been fully realized” — which is exactly what PhRMA sought, to protect its turf.

Perhaps more significantly, the drugmakers won an unprecedented, guaranteed 12-year monopoly for biologic drugs — a costly class of new cell-based therapies that are more complicated to manufacture than more familiar chemical drugs. Twelve years — as opposed to five that most other drugs get — means biologics get a much longer time to dictate prices on the market before they have to face generic-like completion.

The dozen-year market lock is still stirring controversy. One of PhRMA’s top demands for the 12-country Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations was that the monopoly be extended internationally, but other countries balked. The TPP deal set the target at eight years, and the drug industry’s ire is one shadow hanging over the sweeping, unfinished accord.

But the Obama administration’s repeated bid to cut the domestic market protections to seven years – what it had sought during the Obamacare negotiations — has gained no traction on the Hill.

Seven years later, Tauzin’s goal is intact. PhRMA’s not the meal; and everyone else is still picking up that tab.”

Recent studies are showing that not only does expensive chemotherapy for cancer work only two percent (2%) of the time, and costs over $100,000 per year, but drugs in general only work, at best, one out of four times for patients.

So why are we paying for this crap?  And, why are we restricted in our health care choices to using only this junk?

And those Health Insurance companies…

I’m just going to quote Forbes magazine’s Robert Lenzer in his October 1st 2013 article “ObamaCare Enriches Only The Health Insurance Giants and Their Shareholders,” where he says:

“So far in 2013 the value of the S& P health insurance index has gained 43%. Thats  more than double the gains made in the broad stock market index, the S & P 500.  The shares of CIGNA are up 63%, Wellpoint 47% and United Healthcare 28%.

And if you go back to the  early 2010 passage of ObamaCare, you will find that Obama’s sellout of the public interest has allowed the public companies the ability to raise their premiums, especially on small business, dramatically multiply their profits and send the value of their common stocks  up  by 200%-300%.

This is bloody scandalous and should be a cause for concern even as the Republican opponents of the bill threaten the close-down of  the government.

We warned you back on December4, 2009 in my blog ” The Horrendous Truth About Health Care Reform” that the Obama White House was handing a “free ride for the health insurance industry” that would allow premium hikes of 8%-10% a year by CIGNA, Humana HUM +0.04%, Aetna AET +0.37%, UnitedHealth Group UNH +0.15% and Wellpoint, and as well  a $500 billion taxpayer subsidy, a half trillion dollars without any requirement that the health insurers had to spend the subsidy on medical care. Several US Senators including Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia spoke to me openly of the outrageous sellout being foisted on the nation’s uninsured citizens.

At the time I wrote, Goldman Sachs  research operation  estimated that the 5 giants would increase profits by 10% a year from 2010 to 2019, sending their shares up an average of 59%.

In truth,  the shares of CIGNA and some others are up a multiple of several times since the  contest was resolved by a very tight vote in early 2010.  One startling reason for this amazing performance was  that Obama took off the table “proposals to significantly reduce health care costs” as the giveaway in getting the bill through, according to Ron Susskind’s best-selling book ,”Confidence Men,” which I wrote about in a blog on September 24, 2011. (“Obama’s Incoherent Policy-Making”)   Some 3 years later,  UnitedHealthCare  Group(UNH) was  rewarded by  being  added to the  elite list of the Dow 30 industrials.”

So, What is Trump Going To Do?

Trump has already said he would do “Nothing” – and I agree with that strategy.  Let ObamaCare crash and burn.  THEN, and only THEN, will the real problems of the system be openly discussed by the Congressional “Keystone Kops.”

Stay tuned…

Opinion by “Deplorable” Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen